Late during Friday’s opening night performance of “Animal Farm” on the Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s main stage, an outstanding Tiffany Rachelle Stewart’s alternately mesmerizing and menacing Squealer somehow got the audience to clap its approval for the thuggish Napoleon (Melvin Abston). Even as the beleaguered farm animals Napoleon ruled were being stripped of their few remaining rights.

Analogies between then and now — between the Stalinist Russia that was Orwell’s ostensible target and the world we inhabit — come easily in the harrowing and provocative “Animal Farm” envisioned by May Adrales, who writes in her director’s note that “there will always be pigs” willing to steal our food and our freedom. If we let them.

Making the most of the freedom baked into adapter Ian Wooldridge’s script — which gives directors a lot of leeway on how to stage Orwell’s story — Adrales skips the bucolic setting and amber waves of grain. Orwell could be nostalgic about an older, more rural England; conversely, Adrales’ “Animal Farm” plays like “1984.”

The Rep’s “farm” is a meat processing plant; Andrew Boyce’s scenic design is a nondescript, four-walled hell of crumbling tiles and collapsing floors. In the first scene, workers haul and hoist huge slabs of beef onto a table for cutting and packaging; Jonathan Gillard Daly looks on, gun in one hand and whip in the other.

Adrales’ eight-actor cast — all of them playing multiple roles — aren’t humans pretending to be animals. They’re people who’ve become beasts.

Those heads aren’t held high for long; even before Napoleon makes short work of his chief rival (Brendan Titley), the increasingly dominant pigs are already directing the best food into their own trough. It’s only a matter of time before the pigs have coined the slogan insisting that some animals are more equal than others.

Must every revolution be similarly betrayed?

Orwell didn’t think so, which is why he gave so much airtime to the hard-working Boxer (Stephanie Weeks), the clear-eyed but cowardly Clover (Deborah Staples) and the cynical Benjamin the donkey (Daly).

This trio of actors win our sympathy; they also challenge us to look in the mirror. Their eyes — confused and evasive — give the game away; on some level, they all know that what’s happening is wrong. But they each fail to act on what they intuitively understand: The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men and women to do nothing.

“Animal Farm” continues through Feb. 11 at the Quadracci Powerhouse Theater, 108 E. Wells St. For tickets, visit milwaukeerep.com. Read more about this production at TapMilwaukee.com.

PRODUCTION NOTES

Getting physical: As suggested above, Wooldridge’s script – a marvel, really, considering how much dialogue he wrote, in adapting a novella with almost none – gives directors leeway on staging; “the Battle of the Cowshed takes place” is a typically terse example. Much like Matt Daniels – who directed the excellent First Stage production of Wooldridge’s adaptation last May – Adrales enacts such scenes through evocatively physical theater. It’s not going too far to describe what movement director Nancy Lemenager gives us, here, as stylized dance – or, perhaps more accurately, public ritual, in a world where every move is choreographed. It’s both beautiful and disturbing, inspiring and dispiriting.

Tiffany Rachelle Stewart: As also suggested above, Stewart inspires similarly mixed emotions in her main role as Squealer. Watching her slither her lithe body around the facts to tell ever bigger lies can be funny and even charming; it’s akin to watching a magician, who entrances us even though we know we’re being conned. But Stewart’s magic is also physical and backed by force – embodied in the height advantage she enjoys over much of the cast. Even when she seems most playful, there’s a glint in her eye that’s dangerous; by night’s end she’ll have increasingly distanced herself from her fellow animals and grown monstrous. I don’t want to divulge all the steps she takes on this road to hell; some of them are shocking. It all adds up to the first great performance I’ve seen in 2018. I hope we see Stewart again on a Milwaukee stage; watch her in this role and I’d wager you’ll agree.

Cast size: Wooldridge wrote his adaptation for a cast of six because he had no choice; he was working on a small company’s tight budget. But he isn’t particular in his program notes about which actors take on additional roles, and he also makes clear that his script can accommodate “many more” actors than he used. Tapping the Rep intern program, Adrales herself expands her cast from six to eight.

With First Stage’s 18-actor rendition of Wooldridge’s script fresh in my head, I wish the Rep production had been much bigger than it was, for two reasons.

First, some of the double casting can be a distraction; Stewart, for example, is both the smart and wily Squealer as well as the narcissistically stupid Molly, and it throws one when she switches at one point between these two roles. Similarly, Daly is both the nasty, pre-revolution overlord of the farm and the put-upon Benjamin the donkey. It doesn’t compute.

Second, Orwell’s fable is also a profile of how readily people can morph into a mob; it would help if Squealer had that sort of critical mass to work with (and if Napoleon had a larger retinue of snarling dogs and wallowing pigs surrounding him, as part of his cult of personality). Stewart instead incites us, and she’s good at it. But it’s not quite the same as it would have been to watch her transform a larger world.

I get it: Professional actors are expensive; those performing for First Stage’s Young Company work for free. Adrales has done wonders with the number of actors she has. That’s precisely why I’m intrigued by what she might have done with more.

Workers of the world: In her director’s note, Adrales tells us that in preparing this show, she and her creatives “looked at cruel and harsh labor conditions. We took images of soulless industrial and migrant farms with abusive labor practices.” Hence Boyce’s nightmarish scenic design, illuminated by bright-ugly lighting suggesting a warehouse or prison and the piercing whistle of a regimented world at work or war (lighting design by Noele Stollmack; sound design by Charles Coes and Nathan A. Roberts). What came to mind was the meat processing plant in which Alexander Zeldin’s “Beyond Caring” traces the hellish lives of temporary workers in Chicago. Stalinist Russia, contemporary America: Adrales’ design underscores that for all the differences, all too much remains the same. We still have pigs. We still have far too many people who are powerless and poor.

Orwell’s Socialist vision: Ideologues who co-opted Orwell’s work for their own Cold War agenda loved to quote Orwell stating that “every line I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism.” They skip the rest of the sentence: “and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it.” In his preface to “Animal Farm,” Orwell was equally clear. “For the past ten years,” he wrote, “I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the Socialist movement.” After “1984” was similarly co-opted by the Right – with American reviewers particularly prone to see it as a polemic against socialism – Orwell issued a statement specifically praising the democratic socialist agenda of the British Labor Party. It was ignored. Orwell died a socialist. That gets ignored, too.

All of which matters a great deal in a production of “Animal Farm”; as suggested above, it’s why Boxer, Clover and especially Benjamin – smartest and therefore most disappointing of the three – are so important. “Animal Farm” isn’t a fatalistic fable describing what must be every time there’s a revolution. It’s a fire bell ringing in the night, urging us to wake up and fight for a better world before it’s too late. Credit Adrales: I didn’t leave this “Animal Farm” feeling resigned. On a day that will go down in infamy in American history, I left feeling angry and ashamed. And woke. And hopeful. Orwell wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.